Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera has announced that the technology-news aggregator will begin rewriting headlines on the links it posts — a small change, but one that also illustrates how much the balance of power in media is shifting.

Yes, mobile devices and social networks can produce a lot of distractions, and resisting that may be difficult — as critics like Joe Kraus point out. But is this really a disaster in the making, or just another social evolution we need to undergo?

When Google launched the program, retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners earned referral fees ranging from 6 to 10 percent of a book’s selling price, depending on the number of sales referred. That was a higher rate than the one offered through Amazon’s referral program…

SeaMicro, the startup that built out a business in the low-power, microserver market, is taking its server architecture mainstream by adding Intel’s Xeon chips inside its boxes. This is a fundamental rethinking of how servers are built to respond to the needs of webscale operators.

Browsing recent App Store releases, I came across Minecraft – Pocket Edition, with a version 1.0 update. Thinking it might be a major update to Mojang’s smash hit, I clicked through — only to find a completely different app trying to lure customers who aren’t paying attention.

Here in the U.S., we’re lagging behind nations where HD Voice has been implemented. Thanks to Bria for Android, and its support for wideband audio codecs, I’m now starting to get a taste of this higher voice quality and recorded a demo for you to hear.

Apple has been dealt another blow in its ongoing legal patent war with Samsung. A Dutch appeals court ruled Tuesday that an appeal by Apple against a lower court’s decision from August 2011 is invalid, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 does not infringe on Apple’s iPad design right.

Apple’s new textbook offering and book-authoring software are attractive, and the idea of digital textbooks makes sense, but they are both locked to Apple’s walled-garden ecosystem. That may be fine for music and movies and games like Angry Birds, but is it appropriate for educational material?

Everspin, the spin-out of Freescale Semiconductor attempting to make magnetic random access memory work, said it had shipped 4 million MRAM devices in 2011 and that Dell and LSI use its products. It also has a plan to take on the giant DRAM market.

Analysts at IDC have projected that the dollar per gigabyte price barrier for solid state drives should fall by the second half of this year. What does that mean for data centers, where many operators want to bring down energy usage while speeding up web serving?

Facebook on Thursday debuted a new “listen with” feature that lets groups of people listen to the same song at the same time. The new feature is most directly comparable to turntable.fm, which lets people create music listening rooms and share DJ duties with their friends.

Apple’s iPad is far and away the high water mark when it comes to tablet applications, and a new report Wednesday says it just passed an impressive milestone. Users of Apple’s 9.7-inch touchscreen device are said to have downloaded approximately 3 billion apps in total.

Delivering on a promise, HTC is offering a software tool to unlock its Android devices that launched after Sept. 2011, allowing users to install custom software. The supported phone list doesn’t include AT&T or Verizon models, but the tool is working on some from these carriers.

Next year millions of consumers use fitness devices and apps designed to help them count their steps, calories, sleep and other personal metrics. But in the emerging world of connected wellness tools will newly aware consumers be using apps or devices?

If big data does indeed write the screenplay for the movie about the next generation of business, the climax will be that mathematicians take the prom queen home. If students want high-paying jobs with the coolest companies around, they’d better heed that prediction.

Adding a good API to your web service can result in a 70-percent increase in traffic, according to a survey out this week from a tech research firm. The survey laid out the business and technical reasons companies use APIs and how well they work.